DEAD BEEF (Our Cyber World Book 1) (41 page)

Back in the Situation Room, the feed’s audio returned.

“Team,” Spencer was saying. “If you have a lock on anything, please take it. We’re hitting walls on our side, big, thick ones.” Then a pause, followed by, “Pull it. Pull it now.”

A red light to the right room began to flash. The Chairman of the Joint Chief’s face looked puzzled at first, then went white.

“Mr. President,” Martin was saying. “Please trust me on this one. I have no other safe option at the moment. I’m bringing down power to all missile sites in WNC in 2-1-down, all down — wait two remaining, may be compromised. Stand by, working to neutralize.” Another pause, filled with the sound of furious typing interspersed with cursing and one female accented voice saying “Oh, God save us!”

“Mr. President,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said. “You do realize that at this point, Spencer has brought down between one fourth and one third of our missile force.”

Odehl shook his head. “It’s either that, or that missile force falls into the hands of terrorists. I’d be less worried about our nuclear armed enemies taking advantage of us, and besides, why would they? They have no way of knowing, do they?”

The president sighed and said, “They will know very soon, actually. It’s part of the added visibility we incorporated in the last nuclear arms treaty.”

“Is there a way to disable it? Just for a while so they don’t know?” Odehl asked.

“That will raise even redder flags,” the president said.

“Confirming that two, repeat two missiles and their launchers have been breached,” Spencer said over the audio feed. “Working to recover or neutralize.”

“Oh, God,” the same woman said in Spencer’s control room.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said, “Mr. President, we need to go in the bunker. Now.”

“Sasha how are you doing on the top one?” an unknown male voice was asking and receiving no answer.

“Can’t get through on the bottom one,” Spencer was saying. “New launch codes and destination coordinates are loaded. Got’em.” Another pause, more typing. “Mr. President, one inbound into you. Hasn’t launched yet, but missile is reprogrammed with targeting to D.C.”

A female voice jumped in now, “The other one is getting targeting for... Oh, God, no.” Silence and then, “Tel Aviv, confirmed. Launch sequence starting. 59, 58, 57. God, Martin, what do we do?”

“Successfully blocked launch sequence on D.C. missile. Trying to hold off second attempt.”

“Martin, what about this one?”

“Mr. President,” Martin said. “Forwarding GPS coordinates to Julian’s current location. Please send in a Collections team, urgently.”

“What’s that over there?” Leticia asked. “Looks like a kid sitting in the middle of that field.”

Ochoa moved in closer, then shouted, “Splash him!” when he saw the laptop and the transmitter. “Do it, now! That’s how they’re controlling these things.” He stopped the Land Rover and glared at her. “Now! We have more to do!”

Leticia went up the sun roof and aimed her rifle. “Now!” he barked at her from below. She took one shot and the kid’s computer shattered in half. Another shot and the transmitter went up with a spark. Now the kid was getting up and aiming a rifle back at her. She cursed and took a quick shot that missed wide. The kid’s rifle lit up, and she took another shot. The kid’s chest exploded in a crimson spray cloud.

She dropped to her seat and that’s when she saw it, a cracked windshield and a bullet hole through it, blood seeping out of Ochoa’ right shoulder. “Damn it girl,” he grunted. “One way or another you’re going to kill me.” Ochoa grunted again. The Land Rover jumped over a bump in the field and sped back toward the road.

“All units converge on the following coordinates,” Martin was saying on the cell phone. The coordinates came next.

Leticia took the phone off mute and said, “Martin, this is team #1. Advising the teams that we are now looking for individuals with laptops and transmitters. They are the ones controlling these things.”

She said this as up ahead a swarm of hovercrafts was coming for them. Leticia went up top and started firing, knocking one, then two, then three hovercrafts down. The rest of the swarm turned sharply to the left and headed north.

“That’s better than skeet shooting,” she said after she regained her seat. She looked over at Ochoa and saw his face growing pale.

“I’m OK,” he assured her.

“Jesus, Rod. Pull over. Let me drive.”

Before he could, they saw two SUVs coming right at them, gunfire coming from the passenger side and rooftop of each vehicle.

“Get me down!” Barak ordered the pilot. He was hanging by a tether off the side of the helicopter, watching two SUVs heading straight for the Land Rover, which was making a hard right turn to evade the oncoming attack. “Down, down, closer.” He kept waving at the pilot until he judged an object’s fall would take 5 seconds to hit the ground. He bit into the grenade’s pin with his teeth and pulled.

With his index finger on the grenade’s release, Barak waited until his speed matched that of the SUVs. Then with a gentle and measured underarm motion, he released the grenade. “Up! Up! Up!” he screamed just as one of the gunmen spotted him and started to turn his gun in his direction. Barak pulled himself into a ball away from the impending blast.

The helicopter turned hard right and climbed. This meant Barak never saw his handy work, a grenade landing almost exactly next to the front wheel wells of both SUVs and almost perfectly between them, then exploding, each SUV bursting in flames and going airborne in unison, one flipping to the left, the other to the right.

Now Barak brought a fifty caliber gun to bear and ordered the pilot to turn around. As soon as he had a bead, he lay a steady barrage of bullets on the two overturned vehicles. One exploded, the other caught in flames.

“To the Land Rover,” Barak ordered, and the helicopter banked hard right as the second SUV also exploded.

Up ahead a swarm of hovercrafts went around in a circle, as if suddenly lost. Slowly the hive swarmed down lower and lower until it came crashing down en-mass. Just below him, the Land Rover had come to an awkward looking stop.

Arriving at the Land Rover, Barak jumped before the helicopter touched down. He ran to the car and found both Ochoa and Leticia. Ochoa was awake but looking groggy, groaning, his head resting on an arm draped across the steering wheel. Letica’s head rested to the side. Two bright red spots grew on the right side of her chest.

“Get down here now!” Barak yelled. “And bring the medic kit!”

“Team #1 down, team #1 down,” Martin heard Barak bark into the line. “Need med evac now!”

“On our way,” someone said on the phone. Coming in from Warren Air Force Base. Should arrive in 15 minutes.”

“Make it five,” Barak said. “We don’t have 15.”

“Roger, moving out on the double.”

Martin would have paused to reflect on the carnage his work had produced if he weren’t dealing with something far more severe.

“Launch sequence reset on Tel Aviv rocket. Re-starting at 60-59-58.” Martin kept typing. He was tired, the enormity of it all weighing down on him, and the futility, too. He was close to accepting he couldn’t stop the missiles, that Julian was too good to be stopped now.

“D.C. rocket disabled for now,” Sasha said.

Martin thought that Julian, focusing on the Tel Aviv rocket, had left hers alone. As soon as his was away—. No, he had to stop thinking that way. “Sasha,” he said, “or Itzak. While you’re idle, I need one of you to gin me up a script for the typing I’m doing.”

Sasha leaned over to watch him. Itzak was coming over, when she started typing. “Coming right up.”

Martin froze when he heard Leti’s voice on the phone. In a breathless whisper, she said, “Mr. Spencer, I see Luz waiting for me now, in heaven. We both will be waiting for you. Make sure you meet us there.”

“Barak, cut the feed, please!” Sasha said. She placed one hand on Martin’s shoulder and tried to bring him back. “Focus, Martin.”

Martin wasn’t coming back from this. He saw on the screen that his missile was going up in 30-29-28 seconds, and that was just fine. He stood up and screamed a long guttural cry, the kind one should only hear in a torture chamber. “Noooooooooooo!” he cried out. “Nooooooooooo!” he repeated over and over again.

He dropped to his knees and saw Itzak rush to his computer. Sasha was waving at him, telling him to do something that Martin knew would count for nothing.

Chana rushed to Martin’s side and dropped to her knees in front of him. She winced in pain, and her face filled with tears. She pulled him and brought his head to rest on her chest. “Martin,” she whispered. “Martin, please, for the people of Israel.”

Behind him, Martin heard Sasha call out, “Missile away, missile away to Tel Aviv away.” A pause followed, and then she added, “D.C. missile launch sequence at 50-49-48 seconds.”

Chapter 52

A mile or so ahead, Cynthia saw the first missile rise up with a flash and a cloud. A second later, she heard and felt the acoustic rumble of the rocket’s engine reverberating through her. They were racing to the location Martin had provided, and getting there too late. Below her, inside the cabin, Beloski was driving like a mad man, racing the truck across roads and open fields. Cynthia stood on the bed of the truck, with elbows resting atop the trucks cabin, tethered to hooks on either side of the truck’s cabin. At her side hung her Uzi sub-machine gun. An AK-47 rested in hands that ached to fire it, under the control of a mind that knew it would be useless to do so.

Ahead she saw nothing. No SUVs, no middle-eastern men sitting on the ground Indian style, on a meditative state as they monitored a laptop and operated a high power transmitter.

Cynthia felt the heat, coming from her left, no more than three football lengths away. She banged on the top of the cabin and shouted, “Stan, stop!”

The truck came to a stop, and they watched. It was dangerous to be here, so close. Debris from the launch would be raining all around them in just a few seconds. Cynthia knew it didn’t matter. Not now, as the missile’s nose broke through, then the body, then the engine. The acoustic rumble made the truck rattle, and her insides felt as if they were going to liquefy.

“Martin, what have we done!” she whispered.

Inside the truck’s cabin, through the cell phone’s speaker Sasha’s tired, defeated voice said, “D.C. missile away, repeat, D.C. missile away.” After a pause she followed with, “All other sites secured. Repeat. All other sites secured and holding. Only one set of eighty nodes remain active. Nothing more to do on our end. Repeat, nothing to do on our end.”

At that moment, Cynthia saw the swarm rising higher, spiraling higher and higher around the second rocket’s contrail.

Fayez saw his swarm going up, and he focused. A few seconds more and he snatched it. The missile’s disarm and destroy code sequence.

He typed furiously to generate his own script of exactly seven commands, and though there was no time to double-check, Allah confirmed for him it was perfect. He executed it.

A second later, an explosion up above told him it had worked. One rising contrail turned into three, and a shower of eighty dead hovercrafts rained down along with chunks of rocket debris.

At Cynthia’s urging, Beloski accelerated the truck at full throttle and turned hard right to avoid getting pelted with the descending debris. Then, Cynthia saw him, a young man on one knee firing a rifle at an oncoming SUV.

To this day Cynthia can’t really tell who or what told her to do this, but instinctively, she did not fire on the boy and instead opened up on the SUV with both her guns. The SUV’s driver side windows shattered, and she saw at least one of her bullets connect with the driver. He slumped forward, and the SUV screeched into a tumbling roll, coming to a stop a few yards from the boy.

He was now limping toward her, using his AK-47 like a walking stick, and dragging a bloody leg as he moved toward them.

“I know where Brother Martin Spencer is!” he was shouting. “Please, we must go to him at once!”

“How would you know where he is?” Cynthia asked him.

“His real name is Julian,” the young man answered. “They told us he was Brother Martin Spencer, but I knew his real name is Julian Rogers. Please, you must take me to him.”

Cynthia aimed her gun at him and said, “Stop right where you are!”

“I did that,” the boy said, pointing at the sky. “I stopped it. See? Three contrails, the first odd number that denotes plurality. See also how one and three are one. There is no god but Allah; hear oh Israel, the Lord your God is one, the Godhead three in one.” He paused then added, “I stopped it because it is wrong to kill. It does not please Allah to kill the guilty along with the innocent. Please, take me to Julian.”

To this day Cynthia won’t be able to tell you this either: how she made sense of any of what the boy told her, or why she lowered her AK-47 and dropped it on the bed of the truck, or for what reason she jumped out of the truck and ran to the boy, and why she helped him climb into the passenger seat, still carrying his own AK-47. Nor will she be able to remember how Beloski and she had traded places, nor how long it took her to speed south to arrive at GPS coordinates that Saleh Fayez gave her.

The only thing Cynthia knew then was that this boy might be able to help Julian disarm the other missile. At least that’s what she says now, though if you look in her eyes, you'll see she’s not sure of that either.

She is completely sure, however, that, as if in a trance, she felt swept along by this boy and by a wave of overwhelming circumstances. She was sure then as she’s sure now that she had no other choice.